SARATOGA SPRINGS — It is spring, which means I have been sticking plants and flowers in the ground that will be engulfed in weeds by July. Would I be annoyed if some of those newly planted flowers were ripped from the ground?

Yes, I most certainly would be. And upon discovering holes in the dirt where plants used to be, I would no doubt aim my suspicions at the usual suspects from springs and summers past:

1.) Tommy, the backyard woodchuck who annually yanks up anything that resembles a crucifer.

2.) Olive, the German Shepherd who lives in our house and digs massive holes during frequent, frantic searches for a tennis ball.

3.) The unnamed, unrepentant neighborhood squirrels who perform flagrant acts of mischief, including chopping down sunflowers at their base to get at the seeds up top. (The little jerks are clever. I'll give them that.)

Although it would be splendid to see Tommy led away in handcuffs, I have never been tempted to call police over all of this thievery. I don't believe I'd have called in the law even if I knew my flowers had been harmed by human hands.

But then again, nobody has ever confused me for Michele Riggi. Not yet, anyway.

It was Riggi, the Saratoga Springs socialite, who called police and ranted to her many Facebook friends after discovering that evildoers had pilfered two of the gazillion tulips planted around the expansive grounds of "Palazzo Riggi," the $6 million mansion on North Broadway.

"If we all work together maybe we can find them along with my lawn jockey," Riggi wrote as part of a post that included a picture of the alleged getaway car and an accusation that wayward scholars from nearby Skidmore College were surely responsible.

You can take this story as one more example of how Saratoga Springs is a bubble onto itself. It is surely the only upstate locale in which "socialite" is considered a valid occupation or where somebody would un-ironically call their home a palazzo. It might be the only city where police would take the theft of two flowers seriously, as officers apparently did for Riggi.

And where else could a little tulip pilfering attract the attention of a bounty hunter turned reality TV star? Yes, Duane "Dog" Chapman, the not-especially-famous host of "Dog the Bounty Hunter," decided to do some sniffing on this extremely important case.

Don't ever change, Saratoga. We love you just as you are.

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Ultimately, the tulip larcenists were so wracked by guilt that they returned the two flowers with a rueful note of apology. City police, with very little actual policing to do, apparently, returned the pathetically wilted tulips to Riggi.

I have one question. WHAT ABOUT THE LAWN JOCKEY?

Perhaps because the little fellow is still missing, Riggi has been in no mood to forgive. On Facebook, she noted that the head of Skidmore had not apologized for the school's alleged role in her great suffering, which has included, she said, finding naked students frolicking in her pool.

Riggi vowed revenge against the thieves. "I'm not done with them yet they are totally going to have to pay for what they did one way or the other," she wrote. "I'm fed up and they're going to have to answer to me!!!"

While acknowledging that vandalism is bad and that people should respect private property, is it fair to wonder whether Riggi, who infamously dresses the 30 or so dogs she owns in designer clothing, is a bit out of touch? Or whether her fantastic wealth has so greatly isolated her from the world's suffering that she honestly believes the plucking of two flowers is a crime of significance?

But there's another way to look at this.

Maybe, just maybe, Riggi is a solo voice for justice backed by a massive chorus yet to sing. Maybe the Saratoga socialite is speaking for all us regular folks who, with dirt under our fingernails and pitchforks in our calloused hands, know the sting of finding a hole in the ground where a lovely perennial once sat.

In other words, perhaps Riggi is the general leading an army of gardeners, victimized by plant-thieving humans and animals alike, WHO ARE MAD AS HELL AND AREN'T GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE! Gardeners of the world, unite!

I don't know about you, but I'm inspired. From now on, things are going to be different around Palazzo Churchill.

The next time Tommy murders a broccoli seedling, I expect nothing less than a SWAT team to arrive. You've destroyed your last sunflower, squirrels. You can dig, voles, but you can't hide. We're coming for you.

That's not all. If we all work together and come together as one, I just know we can find that lawn jockey.